I have a slight fascination with sweeteners. About five years ago I imported a kilo of "Neotame" sweetener from a chem factory in Shanghai. It was claimed to be 10,000-12,000 times sweeter than sugar. It's a white powder and came in a metal can with a crimped lid and typically plain chemical labeling. Supposedly it is FDA-approved and a distant derivative of aspartame.
US customs held it for two weeks before sending it on to Colorado with no explanation. When received, the box was covered in "inspected" tape and they had put the canister in a clear plastic bag. The crimped lid looked like a rottweiler chewed it open and white powder was all over the inside of the bag. I unwisely opened this in my kitchen with no respirator as advised by the MSDS which I read after the fact (I am not a smart man).
Despite careful handling of the bag, it is so fine in composition that a small cloud of powder erupted in front of me and a hazy layer of the stuff settled over the kitchen. Eyes burning and some mild choking from inhaling the cloud, I instantly marveled at how unbelievably sweet the air tasted, and it was delicious. For several hours I could still taste it on my lips. The poor customs inspector will have had a lasting memory of that container I'm pretty sure.
Even after a thorough wipe-down, to this day I encounter items in my kitchen with visually imperceptible amounts of residue. After touching it and getting even microscopic quantities of the stuff on a utensil or cup, bowl, plate, whatever, it adds an intense element of sweetness to the food being prepared, sometimes to our delight. I still have more than 900g even after giving away multiple baggies to friends and family (with proper safety precautions).
We have been hooked on it since that first encounter. I keep a 100mL bottle of solution in the fridge which is used to fill smaller dropper bottles. I've prepared that 100mL bottle three times over five years, and that works out to about 12g of personal (somewhat heavy) usage for two people in that time. Probably nowhere near the LD50.
I carry a tiny 30mL dropper bottle of the solution for sweetening the nasty office coffee and anything else as appropriate. Four drops to a normal cup of coffee. We sweeten home-carbonated beverages, oatmeal, baked goods (it is heat stable), use it in marinades, and countless other applications.
I don't know if it's safe. The actual quantity used is so incredibly tiny that it seems irrelevant. I'd sweeten my coffee with polonium-210 if it could be done in Neotame-like quantities. Between this, a salt shaker loaded with MSG and a Darwin fish on my car, I'm doomed anyway.
> The patent covering the neotame molecule in the US, 5,480,668,[10] was originally set to expire 7 November 2012, but was extended 973 days by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The patent is now set to expire 8 July 2015.
Give Animats comment below about how Sucralose is being manufactured more now that its patent has expired it will be interesting to see what happens once Neotame's patent expires later this year.
I'm exceptionally happy to hear this. My entire life, I hated Diet anything and never realized there were actually multiple zero-calorie sweetener options - I thought they were all different brand names of aspartame!
Then I discovered sucralose/splenda just last year, and was surprised that aside from a distinctive taste that can be identified and being twice as sweet as sugar, it's actually alright. Aspartame to me has this really bitter, tangy taste that I'm not able to ignore. The first swill of a cold aspartame-flavored drink on a hot day is fine for ~0.5 seconds until the flavor kicks in, and then I can't take another sip. Splenda/sucralose works just fine for me in my morning coffee, and if you mix granulated splenda with refined sugar in a 1:1 or 3:1 ratio, you can use it in baked sweets without it imparting too much of its distinctive flavor. (Personally, I find it's a decent low-calorie option for baking apple pies).
I'm also glad to hear they're switching to sucralose because - maybe this is silly - it makes me assume they have reason to believe it's safer.
(Diet Dr Pepper and Diet Canada Dry taste OK, FYI. Not identical, but close enough to the real thing.)
There's a meme that Diet Coke "tastes like robot sweat". (I don't know the source, but the earliest online reference I found was an anime forum from 2003.) btw, I prefer Diet Coke, too. :)
"Aspartame is one of the most rigorously tested food ingredients ... has been deemed safe for human consumption by over 100 regulatory agencies in their respective countries."
From the that section - "Headaches are the most common symptom reported by consumers." and "reviews have noted conflicting studies about headache".
My wife is one of those consumers. She gets a headache like clockwork after having something with Aspartame in it. So, we didn't need a study in order to know that Aspartame is bad for us.
I'd much rather spend my money on Dry Soda. I buy alot of their Cucumber flavor myself and the stuff is delicious. It doesn't leave you feeling gross and has much less sugar, plus natural flavor extracts and uses cane sugar.
Edit: also, I like the Stevia soda, but no-calorie sweeteners always leave an acrid taste in my mouth, and upset my stomach so I prefer Dry Soda or just plain seltzer water.
Much like the brewing scene, there's a great craft soft-drink scene. I don't drink many soft-drinks, but occasionally I do enjoy a good ginger beer, root beer or birch beer...
Glad to see that these guys are still around. I used to work down the block from their headquarters in Seattle and stopped in quite often. I second that it's great stuff.
Finally! The trouble with aspartame is that it breaks down under heat, or even just over time. Since the cola manufacturers stopped bottling locally and shipping through their own supply chain, cases of cola are more likely to spoil. Sucralose is heat-stable, so it can be used in hot drinks and in baking, and won't break down every time some delivery person leaves a case of soda sitting in the sun.
Until recently, production of sucralose was confined to one vendor, Tate and Lyle, and they had limited production capacity. The last patent expired in 2009, so now others can make it. But it's a difficult production process, and the competitors have had trouble ramping up capacity. Also, a few years ago, Tate and Lyle moved production from the US to Singapore, then moved it back to their plant in Alabama, still the largest sucralose plant in the world. The process is energy-intensive enough that high energy costs in Singapore were a serious problem.
The competitor in India gave up, but the competitor in China, JK Sucralose, seems to be doing well. Tate and Lyle says that supply now exceeds demand, complains about competition, and just raised sucralose prices 20%.[1] It's about $80 - $100/kg for food-grade sucralose. Diet Coke with Splenda has about 80mg of sucralose per 16oz bottle, so the cost is about one cent per serving.
Of course they're yanking it because of "consumer concerns", i.e., Dr. Joe Mercola managed to convince people by the thousands that aspartame will make your testicles shrink and give you cancer and your kids autism. Unless you have phenylketonurea (in which case you can't eat much of anything anyway), aspartame is no more harmful than any other artificial sweetener.
Tastes fucking narsty though, so I'll be glad it's gone. But as it turns out, just about anything sweet that isn't fruit is bad for you in the long run, so we should be treating all carbonated sodas the way we treat cigarettes.
As the article state clearly, this is to address consumers concerns and not facts based on science. Aspartame has been accused of so many things yet so few credible scientific paper has really blamed it for anything major.
In Scandinavia, Diet Coke was actually made with sucralose for a couple of years, around 2006-2007. It had a "now with sucralose!" logo and it tasted a lot better than the aspartame version, and was in fact what made me able to switch from sucrose-based Coke to Diet. I was disappointed when they (for unknown reasons) switched back to aspartame.
Cyclamate is approved in at least 55 countries [1], including all of the EU, which approved in 1996 after studies could not determine any health risks. As far as I know, the study that prompted the U.S. to ban cyclamate has since been debunked [2].
Aren't there much better sweeteners these days? I tried erythritol a while ago and it tasted just like sugar to me. Why aren't we using that in more products?
Aspartame is "one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the [FDA] has ever approved"[0]. Most other sweeteners are relatively new and the long term affects on humans and the environment has yet to be proven.
Aren't they used already, e.g. Diet Coke vs Coke Zero? I thought the difference between the two was in the sweeteners used. (No idea which, if any, are 'better')
The main breakdown products of aspartame are aspartic acid and phenylalanine. You may have been born with a genetic mutation that makes it possible for you to taste phenylalanine, which tastes bad.
Once you get used to it that goes away. Regular coke tastes really weird if I have been drinking diet for a while and the same happens if I switch to diet from regular. I'm pretty sure they are all bad for you regardless.
Likewise. To me, it's like getting my mouth coated by an oil slick, and then it's all I can taste for an hour. I can't understand how anyone could stand it.
I get a slight metallic taste from Coke Zero. However I find that Diet Coke leaves me with cotton mouth, so I switched to Zero.
I used to drink Coke regularly but I was advised to stop for health reasons. I'm not morbidly obese or anything however I have a couple of medical problems that can be solved by losing a few kilos :) I don't tend to ingest a lot of sugar from other areas so switching to a non-sugar soft-drink was a no brainer.
My understanding, when they made diet coke they couldn't replicate the flavor of coke that well, so diet coke is based on an entirely different formula. Coke zero is supposed to be coke without sugar.
Stevia is actually ~four sweetening compounds, not one [1]... the after taste you're discussing comes from stevia extract with the four compounds in their natural ratios.
I believe Coke is starting to use stevia because biosynthesis is bringing the cost down, and allowing you select which of the four compounds you'd like[2]... although I haven't managed to taste yet it myself, I believe this solves the after taste problem.
Coca-Cola Life is being sold in the U.S. here and there. Seems like a widespread test more than a full-scale roll-out at the moment. But yeah, it's here.
US customs held it for two weeks before sending it on to Colorado with no explanation. When received, the box was covered in "inspected" tape and they had put the canister in a clear plastic bag. The crimped lid looked like a rottweiler chewed it open and white powder was all over the inside of the bag. I unwisely opened this in my kitchen with no respirator as advised by the MSDS which I read after the fact (I am not a smart man).
Despite careful handling of the bag, it is so fine in composition that a small cloud of powder erupted in front of me and a hazy layer of the stuff settled over the kitchen. Eyes burning and some mild choking from inhaling the cloud, I instantly marveled at how unbelievably sweet the air tasted, and it was delicious. For several hours I could still taste it on my lips. The poor customs inspector will have had a lasting memory of that container I'm pretty sure.
Even after a thorough wipe-down, to this day I encounter items in my kitchen with visually imperceptible amounts of residue. After touching it and getting even microscopic quantities of the stuff on a utensil or cup, bowl, plate, whatever, it adds an intense element of sweetness to the food being prepared, sometimes to our delight. I still have more than 900g even after giving away multiple baggies to friends and family (with proper safety precautions).
We have been hooked on it since that first encounter. I keep a 100mL bottle of solution in the fridge which is used to fill smaller dropper bottles. I've prepared that 100mL bottle three times over five years, and that works out to about 12g of personal (somewhat heavy) usage for two people in that time. Probably nowhere near the LD50.
I carry a tiny 30mL dropper bottle of the solution for sweetening the nasty office coffee and anything else as appropriate. Four drops to a normal cup of coffee. We sweeten home-carbonated beverages, oatmeal, baked goods (it is heat stable), use it in marinades, and countless other applications.
I don't know if it's safe. The actual quantity used is so incredibly tiny that it seems irrelevant. I'd sweeten my coffee with polonium-210 if it could be done in Neotame-like quantities. Between this, a salt shaker loaded with MSG and a Darwin fish on my car, I'm doomed anyway.